Digital Cipher No. 32

I. Music & Tech

Tencent Music Entertainment : Music Streaming Gone Public

Chinese investment firm Tencent announced it will spin off Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) with a US IPO. Already approved by the Stock Exchange of Hong, and being underwritten by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, TME is expected to see a valuation of ~$30B – read more here.

Apple Music Outpaces Spotify w/ U.S. Subscribers

An anonymous “major” music distributor reported that Apple’s streaming service has surpassed Spotify’s total number of U.S. subscribers. Both companies are hovering around 20 million in the U.S. and it seems Apple has just forged ahead. The Wall Street Journal first reported Apple was on pace to accomplish the feat back in February – read more here.

Musical Stories for Instagram

Instagram recently announced that the 400M Instagram users that create stories while now be able to add music to their posts. With the ability to add musical stickers next to GIFs and other stickers, users will have a library of thousands of tracks to choose from and will have the ability to preview before publishing. The feature will be rolling out to iOS and Android in the near future – more details here.

Youtube Music Continues Expansion

With plans of rolling their music service out to 12 more countries, Youtube music’s presence will exist in 17 markets. They will be launching a Premium video service across all 17 of these markets as well. Back in February CEO Susan Wojcicki, made very clear that this is just beginning when she announced plans to launch in as many as 100 countries – read more here.

Spotify Hints @ Hardware

Spotify is paving the way for hardware with wireless connectivity. For quite some time the company has had plans to launch a physical music player for vehicles , but over the past month they have made deliberate motions to toward the launch of a hardware product by registering with the FCC – more details here.

Roli Secures Sony Investment

Sony’s Innovation Fund recently made a strategic investment in UK-based music tech firm Roli. While the terms of the deal are undisclosed, Roli has confirmed the figure to be over $50M; The company has raised over $100M to date and produces programmable music software/hardware such as the Seaboard – read more about Roli here.